Early Protestant Reformation
The '''Early Protestant Reformation' lasted from about 1517 AD until 1547 AD. It began with the publication Martin Luthar’s Ninety-five Theses in 1517 AD that sparked the Protestant Reformation. It then ended with the end of the reign of Henry VIII in England in 1547 AD, whose disagreement with the pope over an annulment initiated the English Reformation. Through the revolutionary potential of the printing press, the reforming ideas of an obscure monk from a tiny German duchy called Martin Luthar, spread rapidly throughout Europe. Luther's theory was that if everyone just returned directly to the Bible, they would see the one single truth. Instead, he sparked off the Protestant Reformation, a European conflagration of unparalleled violence, that ravaged Western Christendom for more than a century, that destroyed forever the religious unity of Europe, and had far-reaching political, economic, and social effects. Meanwhile, the Age of Discovery brought Europeans into contact with the immensely wealth but underdeveloped Inca and Aztec civilisations in the Americas, which ended in ruin to both, and almost inadvertently kicked-off the age of European colonialism. The discovery of vast quantities of gold and silver in the Americas shifted the European Balance of Power, introducing Spain as a new great power, while the Reformation added new religious zeal to the rivalry and sometimes peculiar bedfellows; even long-time rivals France and England would occasionally find themselves on the same side. Early 16th century West Europe was overshadowed by three glamorous king. While England's Henry VIII with his six wives has an assured niche in popular history, Western Europe was dominated by Francis I and Charles V, whose bitter personal rivalry achieved little other than draining the resources of France, Spain and imperial Germany, as well as bringing an end to Italy's medieval heyday. Yet Europe's foremost powers was none of these three. Under Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman Turks controlled from Hungary through the Middle East to as far west as Algeria, and enjoyed a Golden Age ''of legal, administrative, and cultural achievements. History The Reformation In the early-16th-century, an unparalleled conflagration shook western Christianity, that destroyed forever the old medieval unity of the faith, and had far-reaching political, economic, and social effects; the '''Protestant Reformation' (1517-1648). In the half-light of a dawning modernity the deepest determinant of all men's lives was still the Catholic Church. Laymen set the pattern of their day to the bell of the parish church, monastery, or cathedral calling the more faithful to prayer every three hours. When the harvest was in, the Church blessed it. The local priest was there for every pivotal moment in a person's life; baptizing them, marrying them, hearing their confessions, and providing last rites. The Church provided all of the social services, from distributing alms to the poor, to running orphanages, and providing what little education was available. And the Church owned around one-third of all the land in Europe. Many factors contributed to the marked decline in morality and discipline within the Church during the 14th and 15th centuries. The Black Death cause particularly severe losses among clergymen, who were eventually replaced by hastily trained and inexperienced men often lacking the rigor of their predecessors. In the wake of the Great Papal Schism, the Papacy.struggled in vain to recover its lost authority and dignity. If anything, the Italian Renaissance made corruption worse within the Church, as Popes indulged in transforming Rome into the most opulent court in Europe. The scurrilous and worldly reputation of Renaissance Popes began with the election of Sixtus IV (1471-84), who had the effrontery to sell indulgences, as a new revenue stream to fund the construction of the Sistine Chapel; indulgences evolved from practices commonly used during the Crusading Age. Sixtus also brought nepotism within the Church to new heights. His nephew Julius II (1503-1513) later became Pope, who energetically granted indulgences to fund the rebuilding of St. Peter's Basilica. He also shocked contemporaries by personally leading an army in battle, fired by territorial ambitions. Between these two came the most notorious of the Renaissance Popes, Alexander VI (1492-1503) of the Borgia family, who manipulated Italian politics to gain advantage for his family, and fathered as many as seven illegitimate children, three while serving as Pope. The wish to rediscover a simpler and more authentic version of the Christian life was characteristic of many new movements within Christianity long before Martin Luther. One was the commitment to poverty of the Franciscan Order, and another was a new intensity in the study of early Christian texts paralleling the work of humanist scholars in the Renaissance. But the Englishman John Wycliffe (d. 1384) introduced so many of the major themes of the Reformation that he is usually identified as the main precursor of this greatest of all upheavals in Christian history. As a priest and professor at Oxford, Wycliffe's extensive writing took many controversial lines. He argued that the Church had no proper role in secular matters, attacked the privileged status of the clergy and the pomp of their ceremonies, denied that the Communion bread and wine was literally the body and blood of Christ, and disapproved of clerical celibacy, pilgrimages to saint relics, indulgences, and even the very existence of Papal authority. Most provocative of all, he maintained that all a Christian needed was the example of the Bible, which readers should be able to read in their own language; as opposed to only being available to the clergy in Latin. He and his associates completed a translation of both the New and Old Testament into Middle English by 1395; the Wycliffe Bible was generally ignored by later English Protestant biblical translators as it had been translated from the Latin, rather than the original Greek and Hebrew. Wycliffe was condemned by the Church, but, in the midst of the Great Papal Schism, the two rival Popes had more pressing matters than the English heretic. Wyclif was a thinker rather than a man of action, but his works were a powerful influence on another reformer, Jan Hus (d. 1415), who fermented powerful unrest among his followers. For ten heady years, he preached sermons at Bethlehem chapel in Prague, speaking in his native Czech language, and arguing for a Christianity of piety, poverty and humility, very different from the worldly grandeur of the Papacy. As a prominent voice of Church reform, Hus was invited to the Council of Constance (1414-17) to put his case; the same council that ended the Great Papal Schism. The invitation posed obvious personal danger to Huss, but he was reassured by a promise of safe-conduct from the Holy Roman Emperor. The council rapidly condemned Jan Hus as a heretic, and burned him at the stake, with the emperor's tacit approval. When news Hus' martyrdom reached Prague, the movement for reform was greatly strengthened. His ideas spread rapidly throughout Bohemia (modern-day Czechia and Slovakia), fuelled by a nationalist wave of anti-German sentiment, and soon the whole country was in open revolt under the brilliant leadership of Jan Želivský (1422); the Hussite Wars (1419-1434). In 1419, the Hussites captured Prague itself, and tossed several Catholic officials out the windows of the Town Hall to their deaths; thus introducing the word "defenestration" into the political lexicon. They then defeated a series of Crusades proclaimed against them by the Pope and emperor, becoming notable for their extensive use of early hand-held firearms. In 1434, the Hussites finally agreed to submit, having wrung major concessions from the Papacy, that allowed them to practice their somewhat idiosyncratic rites under a semi-independent locally elected archbishop; effectively a national church. The religious wars nevertheless weakened Bohemia to the point that it eventually came to be dominated by the Habsburgs. Meanwhile, the Dutch humanist philosopher Desiderius Erasmus (d. 1536), widely considered the greatest humanist scholar of his day, was highly critical of the abuses within the Catholic Church and called for reform, arguing for the holy text to be translated into every language to bring the Gospel truth closer to ordinary men and women. Yet neither he nor those who shared his viewpoint challenged the authority of the Church or Papacy. They were good Catholics. In his old age, he kept his distance from the Protestant thinkers, instead emphasizing a middle way. The demand for reforming Church abuses was something in the air at the beginning of the 16th-century, waiting for the man and occasion which would make them into a religious revolution. No other term is adequate to describe what followed the unwitting act of an obscure German monk. Martin Luther '(d. 1546) lived all his life in the tiny German town of Wittenberg on the Elbe, almost at the back of beyond. He was an Augustinian monk, deeply read in theology, and somewhat tormented in spirit. At age 27, Luther was given the opportunity to visit Rome, and came away disillusioned by the immorality and corruption he witnessed there. Obsessed by his own unworthiness, he came to the conclusion that no amount of good works or adherence to Church doctrine can be the basis of salvation. If the Christian life is not to be meaningless, he argued that God's grace for the guilty sinner is granted through faith alone, for which he found evidence in the writings of St. Paul; "''The just shall live by faith". Nothing could be further from this concept than the behaviour of the friar Johann Tetzel, whom Archbishop Albert of Mainz employed to sell the indulgences; permission had been granted by the Pope in return for a donation to the building of St Peter's Basilica. Tetzel was a showman who went far beyond the official doctrine of indulgences. News of this travesty reached the ears of Luther, who had often argued against the sale of indulgences in his sermons. Now he took a more public stand. He writes out ninety-five propositions about the nature of faith and contemporary church practice. In response, on 31 October 1517 he wrote out his Ninety-five Theses, and supposedly nailed it to the door of All Saints' Church in Wittenberg, for all to see. The underlying gist of the ninety-five propositions about the nature of faith and contemporary Church practice, was that truth was to be sought in the Scriptures, rather than in the teaching of the Church. The tone was searching rather than doctrine, and he seems to have intended to merely launch a debate on Church reform in Wittenberg. Yet instead, thanks to the printing press, his ideas spread rapidly throughout Europe and sparked off the Protestant Reformation. Like Hus, Luther was invited to a Church Council to put his case, this time with a promise of safe conduct from the Holy Roman Emperor himself; the Diet of Worms (1521). Like Hus, he was condemned as a heretic, although he was only arrested and imprisoned for ten months. While imprisoned, he completed a task which would profoundly influence the development of the later Reformation; a translation of the Bible into colloquial German. Luther’s Bible was first published in 1522, and hundreds of thousands of copies were eventually printed; William Tyndale would publish an English version in 1526, and Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples a French version in 1530. For the first time ever, non-priests could read the Bible for themselves. Luther's theory was that if everyone just returned directly to the Scriptures, they would see the one single truth. Yet the inevitable consequence was that people started having different interpretations of what religious truth is. Soon religious reformers were springing up all over Europe; the Anabaptists in Zurich from 1525, Ulrich Zwingli (d. 1531) in Switzerland, and John Calvin (d. 1564) in France. Within a generation or two the variety of Protestant faiths defies summary. The Reformation quickly spun-off in political directions. In 1525, Duke Albert of Prussia (1510-25) became the first ruler in Europe to break from the papacy and establish a Protestant state church; he was motivated, as were many who followed him, by a desire to seize the Churches land and assets. Two years later, Sweden follow suited, with King Gustavus Adolphus (1611-32) standing out for the incredible cynicism with which he plundered Church property. His example was followed, with a little more decorum but no less efficiency, by Henry VIII in England. Meanwhile at the Council of Trent (1545), the Catholic Church launched the '''Counter Reformation, both an attack on Protestantism, and a spiritual and structural reform of the Catholic Church itself. The Reformation divided Christian Europe as few other ideas could: Italy and Spain became the great centres of the Catholic Counter-Reformation; England, Scotland, all of Scandinavia, and Holland became Protestant states; and in Switzerland, France, imperial Germany, and Ireland the situation was more complex. Everywhere religious reform was used as a pretext for destruction and sectarian violence, with martyrs on both sides in the tens-of-thousands. There was also a dramatic increase in anti-semitism and witch trials. In Switzerland, religious violence broke-out between individual Catholic and Protestant cantons. In France, the country remained Catholic with a significant Protestant minority, leading to the French Wars of Religion. Imperial Germany was divided into a patchwork of Catholic and Protestant duchies, eventually leading to the bloody conclusion of the Protestant Reformation in the devastating Thirty Years' War, which cost more than 25% of its population. The Peace of Westphalia (1645) that concluded the Thirty Years' War is generally accepted as the end of both the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. Yet the bitter hostilities arising from the Reformation persisted in European history throughout the intervening centuries to our own time. In Ireland, the population remained Catholic even after the Tudor conquest of Ireland for a variety of local reasons, leading to centuries of persecution and oppression; no Catholic could hold any public office in Britain until Catholic Emancipation in the 19th century. A quarter-century of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland from 1970, shows all too vividly that the dark side of the Reformation is not entirely a thing of the past. Yet the Reformation had positive effects too. Firstly, by encouraging ordinary people to read the Bible in vernacular languages, Luther helped to provide one of the most effective arguments for universal literacy and education in the history of Western civilization. Secondly, by questioning the power of the Catholic Church, it led some people to seek real and lasting reform to the social order. In 1525, German peasants took up Luther’s ideas to give voice to longstanding grievances against feudal landlords and the clergy. Although the rebellion was suppressed within a year with crushing brutality and the slaughter of nearly 100,000 peasants, it was Europe's largest popular uprising until the French Revolution. Thirdly, by bringing to an end the blind faith in the Catholic Church, the Reformation subtly empowered people to question the world around them unrestricted by the control of the Church, contributing to the Scientific Revolution. Fourthly, some historians have credited Protestantism with the success of the Dutch merchants and English colonialism, supposedly through the "protestant work ethic". Most historians no longer find this plausible. There were too many successful Catholic capitalists for one thing, and Protestant Scotland long remained backwards and poor. Deriving from Calvin's idea that salvation is essentially predestined but may be glimpsed in the blessings conferred by God here on Earth, it was characterised by hard work, frugality and diligence. Finally, the Counter Reformation largely succeeded in the much needed reform of the Catholic Church, prompting a new era of spiritually and missionary work dominated by a new religious order founded in 1540; the Jesuits. Early Reformation in Germany In Germany, the Protestant Reformation was inexorably intertwined with a growing political hostility to external interference in the affairs of the German principalities, both from the Pope and Holy Roman Emperor. At the Diet of Speyer in 1526, the emperor attempted to calm the situation by allowing each German prince make his own decision on the matter. Within three years, five princes and fourteen imperial cities had become Protestants. Thus imperial Germany became a tapestry of Protestant and Catholic states, adding a new religious aspect to the fragmented nature of the Holy Roman Empire. The need to settle religious unrest in Germany was made more urgent by the shock of the Ottoman Turks besieging Vienna in September 1529. The emperor now tried to take a harder line, ordering all Protestant princes and cities to recant, but the only resulted was the formation of a Protestant pact for mutual defence; the League of Schmalkalden. Over the next two decades the League was often in action against its Catholic neighbours. It suffered a severe reverse at the Battle of Mühlberg (1547), but no military victory could resolve the deep religious divisions within the empire. Eventually, the Peace of Augsburg (1555) restored the compromise of 1526, and imperial Germany settled into an uneasy peace for over half a century, until the bloody eruption of the Thirty Years' War in the early 17th century. Henry VIII of England Not many men have six wives, and even fewer execute two, so it’s not surprising that Henry VIII (1509-1549 AD), son of Henry VII, has an assured niche in popular history of England. Ascending to the throne at the age of seventeen, handsome and athletic, young Henry was an active king during his early reign. He kept a lavish court, quickly draining the treasury he had inherited. He married Catherine of Aragon, the Spanish widow of his elder brother. Allied with Spain, England was a peripheral players in the rivalry between Spain and France. Henry embarked on war with France in 1512, though accomplished little. This prompted Scotland to activate the Auld Alliance with the French and declared war on England, though it met with disaster at the Battle of Flodden (September 1513). By 1520, with the rivalry on the continent intensified into something more personal under Francis I and Charles V, Henry was satisfied of finding each of the more powerful rulers eager for his friendship, famously with Francis I on the Field of Cloth of Gold, and more discreetly with Charles V in Kent. Henry and Catherine had three sons and three daughters, but none survived infancy except a daughter, Mary. Just thirty years after the War of the Roses, the lack of a male heir gnawed at the king. It is a subject of debate whether Henry’s decision to seek an annulment of his marriage and wed Anne Boleyn was a matter of state, of love, or of conscience; or quite possibly all three. Anne, a young woman in his wife’s entourage, was everything that the queen was not; young, pretty, vivacious, and fruitful. The king insisted on seeking seek a papal annulment for his marriage to Catherine. Henry's Lord Chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey, was at first optimistic. The argument hinged ostensibly on two rival verses from the Old Testament (Deuteronomy 25:5 and Leviticus 20.21). Leviticus seemed to support Henry's assertion that his marriage to his brother's widow was from the start against holy writ and therefore invalid. Yet as ever a more practical argument decided the case; Catherine's nephew was Charles V, not only Holy Roman Emperor, but King of Spain. The reversal brought an end to Wolsey's career, though he died of natural causes before he could be execution. Henry's own reaction was forceful. In the turmoil of the Reformation, with the tempting example in Sweden's Protestant state church, did England need the pope? Thus, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury granted Henry his divorce against the Pope’s wishes in May 1532, and Henry and Anne Boleyn were quickly married; she was already four months pregnant with their daughter Elizabeth. Henry himself was no reformer, indeed he had been granted the title "Defender of the Faith" by a previous pope in recognition of his criticism of Martin Luther, but over the coming month the English Reformation pressed ahead. With the backing of parliament, the Act of Supremacy (1534) declared that Henry VIII was head of the Church of England. The newly established Church of England amounted to little more than the existing Catholic Church, with the king rather than the Pope as its head, but that would change under Henry's successors. Within a week, Henry commissioned his principal secretary, Thomas Cromwell, to make a detailed survey of ecclesiastical property in England and Wales, and to find evidence of laxity or corruption to justify the appropriation of their properties; not hard to find at the time. Most of the land was sold to private citizens, with the abbey buildings providing an excellent supply of stone for a slew of picturesque Tudor manor-houses. Only a few brave men in England refused the oath denying the Pope's supremacy. By the end of his reign, some 300 Catholic martyrs would die agonising deaths at the stake, including the Bishop of Rochester and Thomas More, the Lord Chancellor of England. Despite the enormous influx of wealth appropriated from the Church, the king was still continually on the verge of financial ruin throughout his reign, due to his personal extravagance, as well as costly wars and building projects; the palaces of Greenwich, Whitehall, Richmond, Hampton Court, and Nonsuch were all built or extended. Meanwhile, the Act of Supremacy would have a dramatic effect on the English holding in Ireland, leading to the Tudor conquest of Ireland. Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, at first passionate, lasted only three years. After the disappointment of a miscarriage of a stillborn son, he spurned her in favour for another woman of his court, Jane Seymour. In May 1536, Anne had been found guilty of adultery and witchcraft in a trial that was a travesty, and lost her head. Henry immediately married Jane Seymour, who a year later at last produced the long-awaited male heir, Edward, although Jane died two weeks after the birth. Henry's next marriage also led to a death, but not in this case that of the bride. Henry's chief minister Thomas Cromwell persuaded his master in 1539 that an alliance with a Protestant German house was a diplomatic necessity. Unfortunately, Henry disliked Anne of Cleves on first sight, and refused to consummate the marriage, which was easily annulled six months later; Cromwell paid for his blunder with his head. Less than three weeks after the annulment, Henry married another woman of his court, the nineteen-year-old Catherine Howard. For a year Henry was enchanted with his young bride, but then discovered that she was neither a virgin at the wedding, nor a faithful wife, she ended up on the scaffold. Henry’s sixth and final marriage was to Catherine Parr. Already twice widowed herself, she was an intelligent and cultivated woman of thirty-one. Catherine succeeded in reconciling the king's family, and for the remaining few years of his life his three children, from separate mothers, all live together for the first time in the royal household. Henry VIII died in January 1547 at the age of 55 after a 38-year reign, and was succeeded by his son, Edward VI. Henry VIII and Ireland Since the Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland in the 12th century, the English kings had among their title, Lord of Ireland. Yet the Anglo-Irish nobles may have pledged allegiance to the English king, but in truth they were loyal only to themselves. In 1297, a permanent government had been set up structured on English lines with Dublin acquiring its own exchequer and parliament. Yet, this was the high-point of English lordship of Ireland. First, a year after Bannockburn (1315), the brother of Robert the Bruce, Edward, landed in Ireland with 6000 Scots. All the Gaelic-Irish and a considerable number of Anglo-Normans rallied to his cause of ending the rule of their English overlord. Although the uprising was put down after three years with the death of Edward Bruce at the Battle of Faughart (1318 AD), great swathes of land had been taken by the Gaelic Irish that would never be recovered. Thirty years later in 1348, there was an even more disastrous arrival in Ireland; the Black Death. The Black Death ravaged the towns and ports where the Anglo-Normans were strongest. As the Gaelic-Irish exploited English weakness, not only were large parts of the country recovered, but the Irish language and customs came to dominate once again, even among the Anglo-Norman nobles. From 1367, the English parliament in Ireland tried to legislate against such cultural assimilation, describing the Anglo-Normans as "more Irish than the Irish themselves", but with little effect. With England distracted by the Hundred Years' War and War of the Roses, by the end of the 15th century, direct English authority had virtually disappeared outside of the area around Dublin known as the Pale, with the powerful Anglo-Norman Fitzgerald family in Kildare becoming effectively the rulers of Ireland. Ireland had long been something of a thorn in the side of England, a place for English rebels to retreat to beyond the reach of the crown. This situation dramatically changed when Henry VIII declared himself head of the Protestant Church in England, with the Act of Supremacy (1534). Silken Thomas Fitzgerald, Earl of Kildare, a fervent Catholic, went into open rebelled against the crown, but his rebellion failed and he was executed in 1537. In the aftermath, Henry resolved to bring Ireland under English crown control. In 1541, he upgraded Ireland from a lordship to a full Kingdom, and implemented the policy of surrender and regrant over the Anglo-Norman and Gaelic-Irish nobles. In practice, nobles around Ireland accepted their new overlord but carried on as they had before. The Tudor Reconquest of Ireland (1536-1607) to establish centralised English control over the whole of Ireland took nearly a century, during which the country was plagued by rebellions and turmoil. Francis I and Charles V France had its own dashing young king, Francis I (1515-1547 AD), who ascended to the throne at just twenty years-of-age, and bought a new mood of vigour and glamour to the French court. The ailing and expensive Italian adventures of the French king Charles VIII were continued under Francis. In September 1515, the French won a great victory at the Battle of Marignano and captured Milan, with the new king prominent in person. This triumph, in the first year of his reign, made Francis the most glamorous monarch in Europe. The French king, liking what he saw of the Italian Renaissance, was determined to enjoy these splendours. He invited Italian artists to France, including even the aged Leonardo da Vinci who moved to Amboise as “''first painter and engineer and architect''” and bringing with him the Mona Lisa. While da Vinci painted very little during his years in France, others like Il Rosso, Francesco Primaticcio, and Sebastiano Serlio who created the distinctive style at Fontainebleau, Château de Chambord, and the Louvre, made lasting contributions to Renaissance art in France. However by 1519, Francis had a serious challenge for the status of the premier monarch in Europe. Through a series of judicious marriages, Charles V (1516-56), of the powerful Austrian House of Habsburg, ascended to the throne of Spain in 1516. When his grandfather, Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, died in 1519, there was every chance that Charles would also be elected to the imperial crown. This would mean his vast realm would border France both to the south and the east. In desperation, Francis I of France personally contested the imperial election. There was perhaps little chance of a French king being elected, but Charles was taking no risks, clinching the election by dispensing vast sums in bribes; despite his vast empire Charles V would be constantly on the verge of bankruptcy. Thus began the personal rivalry between Francis I and Charles V that would dominate the politics of Western Europe in the coming decades, with England's Henry VIII completing the trio of autocratic young rulers, though as something of a bit player. In 1522, an imperial army drove the French out of Milan. Three years later, Francis marched into Italy to reclaim his territory. Not only were the French heavily defeated at the Battle of Pavia (February 1525), but Francis himself was taken prisoner. After six months, the French king secured his release by giving up his claims in Italy, as well as in the Netherlands, Flanders and Burgundy. Yet Francis had little intention of keeping his word. First, Francis formed an alliance with Venice and the papacy, but this ended in defeat and the sack of Rome by an imperial army in 1527. In the midst of the Protestant Reformation, there was every reason for the two leading European Catholic monarchs to stand together, but Francis simply could not accept the defeat to his rival. The Italian Wars continued throughout Francis' reign, with the French king shocking Europe by allying with the Ottoman Turks, but with no better results. It was be left to Henry II of France (1547-59), Francis’ son, to finally bring the long conflict between France and the Habsburg to an unsatisfying conclusion, but at least with the abdication of Charles V the imperial and Spanish thrones were inherited by two separate Habsburgs. The partition of Italy settled upon in the mid-16th century would remain the basic pattern for more than two-hundred years, with Italy became internationally insignificant until the dramatic arrival of Napoleon in the early 18th century. Meanwhile, Francis had succeeded merely in stalling the Reformation in France, mainly though the brutal persecution of Protestants within Catholic France. Yet the French Reformation would acquire a uniquely intense and political character. Ottoman Heyday After Mehmed II seized Constantinople, the Balkans, and Greece, the political situation in Eastern Europe and the Middle East depended largely on which of Turkey's neighbours was best resisting the expansionist tendencies of the Muslim Ottoman Empire. If the Turks were fighting in the Middle East, Eastern Europe may get some respite, and vice versa. The Venetians were driven out of their Adriatic port in Albania in 1501. By 1517, the Egyptian Mamelukes had suffered a resounding defeat, bringing Palestine, Arabia and Egypt under Ottoman control. Beyond Egypt the Ottoman territory also nominally controlled as far along the coast as Algeria, which had been conquered by Turkish privateers in 1516. The Ottoman Empire reached the apex of her economic, military and political power under Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-66). In Eastern Europe, Suleiman crushed the Hungarians at the Battle of Mohacs (August 1526), and even besieged Vienna in 1529, albeit unsuccessfully. In 1534-5 he turned east to engaged in a rapid campaign, dislodging the Safavid Persians from much of Mesopotamia and capturing the great city of Baghdad. In 1541-3, he was back fighting in Eastern Europe, taking much of central Hungary which remained under Ottoman control for more than a century. Suleiman had essentially recreated the Byzantine Empire of Justinian the Great, and like Justinian, he was renowned as much for his legal, administrative, and cultural achievements, as for his conquests. He issued a single legal code, that harmonised Islamic law (Sharia) with all the judgments on areas such as criminal law, land tenure and taxation made by the nine preceding Sultans. He also enacted new laws protecting his Jews and Christians subjects. Suleiman surrounded himself with administrators and statesmen of unusual ability, who presided over a professional bureaucracy reminiscent of the Byzantines. Under Suleiman's patronage, the Ottoman Empire entered the Golden Age of its cultural development. He sponsored a series of architectural projects within his empire, the greatest of which were the Süleymaniye mosque in Istanbul and Selimiye mosque in Edirne. Education was another important area for the Sultan. Schools attached to mosques provided a largely free education to Muslim boys in advance of anything in Western Europe of the time. At the time of Suleiman's death, the Ottoman Empire was one of the world's foremost powers. Campaigns by the Ottoman Turks later in the 16th century led to substantial peace treaties on both frontiers; with Safavid Persia in 1590 by which stage Georgia and Azerbaijan were in Turkish hands; and with Habsburg Austria in 1606. Afterwards, the Ottomans played a peripheral role in European affairs, barring a succession of wars with Russia starting under Peter the Great, and constant adjustment to the frontier with Austria. This would change in 1798 when the Ottoman Empire found itself unavoidably caught up in Europe's great war of the time, with Napoléon Bonaparte. Spanish Conquest of the Americas By 1515, the Spanish had establish secure colonies in the Americas: Santo Domingo on Hispaniola (1496); San Juan on Puerto Rico (1509); Sevilla la Nueva on Jamaica (1509); and Havana on Cuba (1515), as well as Santa María in Panama (1510), the first colony on the mainland. The indigenous populations were enslaved for working either in mines or sugar plantations; the first sugar mill in the New World was established in 1516 on Hispaniola. The natives also introduced the Spanish to tobacco, which reached Europe in 1528, which soon became another cultivation crop. However, European diseases such as smallpox and measles devastated the original inhabitants; the Taíno people of Hispaniola numbered at least 100,000 before the arrival of the Europeans, but by 1507 their numbers had shrunk to 60,000. Diseases also passed from the New World to Europe, notably the venereal disease Syphilis. By the time the indigenous populations had been virtually wiped out by a combination of European diseases and physical exploitation, the plantation owners were already relying on African-born slaves. Essentially the same pattern already successfully piloted by the Portuguese in Madeira and the Azores, was transferred to the Americas. Soon even more lucrative opportunities were presented to the Spanish. In 1517 and 1518, the governor of Cuba commissioned a series of expeditions to explore the coasts of Gulf of Mexico, which returned with tales of great wealth in the area; the Aztec civilisation. A larger expedition was rapidly prepared to investigate this wealthy kingdom under conquistador Hernando Cortes. Cortes reached the coast of Mexico in March 1519, with eleven ships, carrying some 600 men, 16 horses, and about 20 guns. He founded a settlement at Veracruz, and before proceeding inland, made a bold gesture; sinking ten of his ships. Their first clash with the indigenous people was with the Tlaxcala people, where the effect of horses and guns was rapidly decisive. The Tlaxcalans were in a state of permanent warfare with their dangerous neighbours, the Aztecs. In November 1519, when Cortes approached Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztecs, his small force was augmented by 1000 Tlaxcalans. Yet, no force was needed. They were greeted in Tenochtitlan with the courtesy due to the fair-skinned bearded Aztec god Quetzalcoatl. With a brilliantly controlled blend of persuasion and threat, Cortes was able to orchestrate taking the Aztec emperor under Spanish protection. A few hundred Spaniards had essentially taken control of the mighty Aztec empire. Yet in 1520, the Spaniards lost control of the city, largely due to their own barbarous treatment of the natives. Cortes persuaded the Aztec emperor to address his people urging peace, but he was killed in a hail of missiles. The Spaniards were forced to withdraw from the city in haste, but a year later, Cortes recaptured the city, and there was no further Aztec resistance; the conquest of central Mexico was essentially complete, though the Maya, hard to suppress in the Yucatan jungle, preserved for a while their own ways. Our knowledge today of the rich pre-Columbian culture in Mexico remains patchy because of the thoughtless destruction of the conquistadors; mainly in their lust for gold and silver, but sometimes, as with Mayan manuscripts, as an ideological assault on paganism. Mexico soon became the cornerstone of the Spanish Empire in the Americas; New Spain. The conquest of the Inca Empire of Peru was triggered by a chance encounter in 1527, between two small Spanish ships and an ocean-going Inca raft with a crew of twenty off the Pacific coast of Peru. The exchange was amicable, and they agreed to trade. The Spaniards had glass beads, iron pins, and scissors to offer, and to their astonishment they received in return superbly worked golden objects. The effect of this gold was almost immediate. It took conquistador Francisco Pizarro eighteen months to drum up sufficient support for another voyage of conquest. His small fleet left Spain in January 1530, with 180 men. Unlike the speedy advance of Cortes into Mexico, the difficult march down the coast of Ecuador took him nearly two years, before he was able to establish a small Spanish settlement at San Miguel in northern Peru. In September 1532, Pizarro set-out to conquer the vast empire of the Incas, with 62 horsemen and 106 infantry. Fortunately, the Inca Empire was just recovering from the turmoil of a civil war, after the king and his eldest sons caught smallpox and died from early expeditions, and the king's other sons quarrelled over the succession. Pizarro encountered the new Inca emperor at the town of Cajamarca. Astonished to see horses for the first time, he agreed to meet with Pizarro the next day, where the Spaniards promptly massacre his entourage in an ambush; the Indian dead numbered in thousands, with only the emperor himself spared. Following the example of Cortes, Pizarro planned to control the Inca Empire through a captive ruler. However, the Inca offered a ransom for his freedom that the Spaniards could not refuse; a room of gold and silver measuring 22 by 18 feet, and 15 feet high. While the precious metals were stripped from palaces and temples all over the Inca Empire, Pizarro’s forces were reinforced. When the wealth was finally gathered, the Spaniards, who probably never intended to keep their word, were uncertain what do with him. In July 1533, they accused the Inca emperor of treason and had him executed. In the aftermath, Pizarro installed the emperor’s nephew as puppet Inca ruler, but the conquest of the Inca Empire still took about forty years to complete. There were many Inca rebels, including one led by the puppet emperor himself and another by his son, but they all failed. The conquest was ultimately achieved through relentless violence and deception, aided by the spread of smallpox introduced by the Spanish and by the graudual disintegration of the diverse and demoralised empire. Yet, Peru was a province of immense wealth, far more than Mexico. The Inca gold and silver had come entirely from surface and the Spaniards soon established mines, particularly at Potosí. This region, high in the Andes, was so rich in both silver and tin that it eventually had as many as 5000 working mines. The Spanish treasure fleets began to operate from 1566, bringing the European goods needed in the colonies, and carrying back to Spain the precious bullion with which the colonists pay for it; minus the 20% of all gold and silver due to the Spanish crown. It would not be long before these treasures attracted privateers from northern Europe. Rivals in the Age of Discovery Throughout the 16th century, Spain and Portugal had a virtual monopoly on the Age of Discovery, and for now it suited both Iberian nations to remain on friendly terms. This was reflected in many marriage alliances; King Manuel I of Portugal (1495-1521) married three successive wives from the Spanish royal family. The Portuguese then established a chain of trading-posts along India's west coast, Sri Lanka, and gradually up the east coast; the city of Goa was conquered in 1510 becoming the seat of Portuguese Colonial India until 1961. They also forced the local ruler to ceded to them the island of Bombay in 1534. Meanwhile, they conquered Malacca in Malaysia in 1511, guarding the narrowest channel of the route southeast to the Spice Islands. Meanwhile in 1557, Portuguese merchants established a trading-post on the island of Macao, off the south coast of China. Portugal would monopolise the long sea route round Africa to India and the Spice Islands until the early 17th century, when the Dutch and English began to challenge her hegemony in the Indian Ocean. While the Spanish were conquering the Americas, the Portuguese had no European rivals on the long sea route round Africa to India and the East. The profitable trade in eastern spices was cornered by the Portuguese, undercutting the Venetian trade with its profusion of middlemen. They also traded with China and Japan, establishing colonies at Macau in 1557 and Nagasaki in 1569. Japan's reputation as pirates meant direct trade between China and Japan was restricted, so the Portuguese filled this commercial vacuum establishing a lucrative triangular trade; buying Chinese silks, selling them at a profit in Japan, and then buying more silks for the return journey to Europe. With a population of less than 2 million, Portugal did not to fully exploit her trade monopoly. Overextended, she failed to develop a substantial domestic infrastructure to support these activities: Dutch ships ferried the precious eastern cargoes from Lisbon to northern Europe; and foreigners provided most of the financing for their trading enterprises. The Portuguese were also slow to exploit the discovery of Brazil; named for its most valuable natural product, Paubrasilia, a red wood much in demand for dye. With her focus on the profitable eastern trade and growing involvement in the African slave-trade, in 1533, the king came up with the solution of dividing the coastline into fifteen sections, and granting these strips of land on a hereditary basis to fifteen courtiers to colonise. As elsewhere, sugar plantations became the basis of the economy of Portuguese Brazil. France and England looked on enviously at the wealth that Portugal derived from trade with the East. The Treaty of Tordesillas dividing the world between Spain and Protugal was of little consequence, with king Francis I of France famously quipping, "Show me Adam's will!". France was the first to seek a new western route to the same pot of gold. In 1534, the French king sent Jacques Cartier with two ships and sixty-one men to look for a Northwest Passage linking the Atlantic with the Pacific. His three voyages ended in failure, he mapped the great inlet of the St. Lawrence River as far as Montreal; an attempt to establish a colony near Quebec was abandoned after two years of disease, foul weather and hostile natives. Yet Cartier's discoveries would eventually prompt the interest of French fur traders to these regions; New France (1534–1763). While the French were searching for a way north of America to China and the Indies, the English believed that there may be a route north of Russia. In 1553, three ships set-out from London under the command of Hugh Willoughby, but the expedition proved incompetent and ill-prepared. Six months later Willoughby, with two of his ships, was stranded for the Arctic winter on a bleak shore of the Barents Sea, and, with no suitable clothing or provisions, everyone starved and froze to death. Yet the third ship, separated from the others in a storm, reached the Russian port of Archangel. The captain was invited to visit the Tsar court in Moscow, where he inadvertently help open-up flourishing trade relations between England and Russia. England makes tentative first steps towards establishing a presence beyond the ocean in the same decade as Spain and Portugal, the 1490s. In 1497 Henry VII sends John Cabot on an expedition across the Atlantic to look for a trade route to China. The explorer probably reaches Newfoundland, but his journey provides no lasting result (apart from a theoretical claim to Canada, and news of the rich fishing potential in north Atlantic waters). Category:Historical Periods